Links

1. Moises Velasquez-Manoff at Opinionator: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

2. Andrea Peterson in The Switch: How one publisher is stopping academics from sharing their research

3. Sunshine: Graduate Application in Public Health: A Personal Insight into the US Application System. With the growing trend of American universities using a common application process for entry into their undergraduate and graduate programs, a timely critique of the process that is being used right now for admission to public health schools in the US.

Prof. Gautam Desiraju on doing science in India

In a short, interesting interview in Chemistry Views, Prof. Desiraju, a colleague at IISc, shares his views on a variety of things. What might be of interest to this blog's readers are his views on doing science in India; they appear in his answers at a couple of places. First, about his own career in India:

Tell us a bit about your career path, please.

My career path has been highly unusual. For a start, I did my Ph.D. in the US and returned to India in 1978 in search of a job. Most Indian students in the 1970s did the reverse. They took a masters or doctorate in India and then fled to the US. My American training at the University of Illinois has been an abiding strength throughout. For example, I had no doubt that I would not accept, even as I attempted my tentative steps in the world of chemistry, the highly feudal and paternalistic model for science that prevailed in India. It still lingers on, albeit flabby and inefficient. The very fact that I have gained international recognition even while working in and against this oligarchic set-up, reiterates that one can follow one’s convictions if taught the truth.

I dared to follow my dreams and this led to a new subject, crystal engineering. I have been very fortunate in that two ideas I tried to build up on, namely the concept of the weak hydrogen bond, and the concept of the supramolecular synthon, led to broad support and success.

The second excerpt is his answer to a question about chemistry research and education in India:

What is the current status of chemistry research and education in India?

There is not much to write home about. A country of our size, talent, and resources could have achieved much more in the last four or five decades. We have been crippled by a feudal administration cum research set-up, a pseudo-socialistic model of governance, and a lack of adherence to strict standards and accountability, basically an old boys’ network with a lot of technical incompetence thrown in. There is little interaction between academia and industry, or between chemistry on the one hand and chemical engineering, biology, and physics on the other. Domination of the research and education scene by a handful of aging individuals has led to stagnation in recent years.

On the brighter side, the opening up of educational avenues in regions of the country that had traditionally been deprived of these advantages in the past, through initiatives of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has led to an expansion of the base of the educational pyramid. This can have only good consequences because an increase in the number of educated students must by definition, weaken the feudal apparatus that has controlled science in India for many years.

My Popular Science Books in Tamil

Three of my popular science books in Tamil language have been published now by Tamizhini and Amrutha publishers.

Details with links to Introductions are available in Tamil here http://www.ommachi.net/archives/4555



The books should be sold in Tamizhini and Amrutha book stalls (No. 436 and 437) in the 2014 Chennai book fair between Jan 10 (today) and 22, at the YMCA grounds, Nandhanam.

Online ordering should commence after the book fair. Shall update.

Do also spread the word around.

American Universities, Chinese Students

... In 2007, the U.S. State Department issued roughly 40,000 F-1 student visas to residents of mainland China. (Visa numbers may not correspond exactly with enrollments, but can be a useful measure.) By comparison, 46,000 visas were issued to students from South Korea that year, 34,000 to India, 22,000 to Japan, and 15,000 to Taiwan.

Five years later, visas for South Korean, Indian, Japanese, and Taiwanese students had all declined. Chinese students visas, meanwhile, quadrupled, to 189,000 in 2012, more than the total number issued to students from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Oceania combined. [Bold emphasis added]

More on these astonishing numbers, and the drivers behind them, in Kevin Carey's piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"Now hurry back. I'm running out of things to do."

Via Inside Higher Ed, here's a university president revealing what he does in a lonely campus during the holidays:

Navin Kabra's SCIGen Hoax

Consider this: http://iraj.in/Conference/2013/Pune/ICRIEST/

Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right?

Wrong.

We submitted to two fake papers to this conference – one was complete gibberish auto-generated by using the online fake paper generator at SCIGen, while the other was auto-generated gibberish interspersed with completely ridiculous statements, movie dialogues, and other random things. Both these papers where accepted by this conference.

More on the saga at his blog post: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system. Mid-day also has a story on Kabra's sting operation. [links via Retraction Watch, and Santosh Sali's comment].

* * *

I have seen far too many cases of poor quality journals and conferences (including at least one scamference) that are ripe for this sort of "sting operation", and I am glad that Kabra has taken to trouble to out someone savvy enough to exploit the demand for such conferences, but hapless enough to get caught in his net.

Sting operations that target conference organizers are entertaining, all right. But, the real curse, which Kabra has written about in the original as well as follow-up posts, is on the demand side -- more specifically, institutional rules that put a gun to people's heads and say "Publish! Or else .."

In the past, these rules put a lot of pressure on faculty members in universities and colleges (irrespective of whether they had access to decent research facilities); the Kabra episode tells us that they have unleashed their corrosive effect on masters and bachelors students as well.

So, basically, there's this huge army of people with a "paper" to submit and/or present; when they are unable to find respectable venues for their papers, someone or the other sets up shop to exploit them. There's a lot of money to be made, after all. And, thanks to our shitty institutional rules, a lot of people become "willing victims" of such scams.

And this is what we are seeing all over the map in India, especially in certain engineering disciplines.

Annals of Improbable Careers

We have covered cases of materials engineers (actually, metallurgists -- a word that has gone out of fashion in my tribe) who went on to become an iconic founder of a milk cooperative, a journalist, and a chief minster. Another recent case saw the rise of a mechanical   engineer as Delhi's youngest chief minster.

Now, here's a wonderful essay in Mint by Harikrishna Katragadda on his career in (business) photography after an electrical engineering degree from IIT-M. I'll just have to stop at one extended (but chopped up) quote, but really, the entire essay is worth quoting in full!

I was good at math and physics in school. Which meant that like most good Andhra boys, I was expected to become an “ingineeru”, get a job and get married with a fat dowry. ...

... When I cleared the mother-of-all-engineering-entrance exams, the Indian Institute of Technology-Joint Entrance Exam (IIT-JEE), my parents gave me no option but to join electrical engineering at IIT, Madras. I did not want to be an engineer. I had wanted to study physics at IIT.

I got into photography literally by accident. ...

My move from physics to photography baffled my parents. For them, cameras come out of the closet only during weddings and vacations. My maternal grandmother was inconsolable. A proud woman, she had ruled like the feudal mistress of a large mansion in Vijayawada in her day. She refused to accept photography as a legitimate profession, certainly not after an IIT degree. She had grand visions of how I would become CEO of a company after my IIT, and drive her in a Mercedes car. Much to her horror, I was chasing grumpy CEOs for a photo-op and I drove an old beat-up Ford to work. There was also the predicament of “Which Andhra girl would marry a photographer?” Peace returned to the family home after we agreed on my job description as “someone who takes pictures of Americans and foreigners”.

Links

1. Academics hide snarky, clever comments in the acknowledgements section -- Meredith Carpenter and Lillian Fritz-Laylin in Slate.

2. The Guardian compiles geeky jokes: Scientists tell us their favourite jokes: 'An electron and a positron walked into a bar…'.

   The article leads off with this one:

   Two theoretical physicists are lost at the top of a mountain. Theoretical physicist No 1 pulls out a map and peruses it for a while. Then he turns to theoretical physicist No 2 and says: "Hey, I've figured it out. I know where we are."

   "Where are we then?"

   "Do you see that mountain over there?"

   "Yes."

   "Well… THAT'S where we are."

3. Absruse Goose's take on fundamental-ness scale for academic fields.

4. For comparison, here's the xkcd version -- Purity.

Pardoning Turing

Here's a great post at The Guardian by Ally Fogg on why the pardon is "entirely, profoundly wrong" though it "will be welcomed by many", and is "undoubtedly a gesture of humanity, compassion and progressive values."

In announcing the pardon today, the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, said: "A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man." Turing was certainly an exceptional man but the tribute could not be less fitting. It says that the British state is prepared to forgive historical homosexual acts providing they were performed by a national hero, academic giant or world-changing innovator. This is the polar opposite of the correct message. Turing should be forgiven not because he was a modern legend, but because he did absolutely nothing wrong. The only wrong was the venality of the law. It was wrong when it was used against Oscar Wilde, it was wrong when it was used against Turing and it was wrong when it was used against an estimated 75,000 other men, whether they were famous playwrights and scientists or squaddies, plumbers or office clerks. Each of those men was just as unfairly persecuted, and many suffered similarly awful fates. To single out Turing is to say these men are less deserving of justice because they were somehow less exceptional. That cannot be right. [Bold emphasis added]

[The royal pardon arrived within weeks of the Naz Foundation verdict that it is constitutional (again) to prosecute gays Section 377. See this post by Siddarth Narrain at Kafila unpacking the "unreason" of the Supreme Court judgement. See also the relevant posts (too many to link directly to) at Law and Other Things.]

2013 Dec Music Season Reviews

The 2013 Margazhi Music Season in Chennai is going on. My reviews for the Tamil news daily Dinamalar can be read on page 7 in the Chennai city edition, Sunday through Thursday. The first four are already up between 9 and 12/12/13.

Their e-paper update is also prompt (Click and choose, Chennai in the top View Sub-Editions bar and choose page 7; click on the article and it opens into a separate readable page).

Of course, you can also read the reviews from the music section in my Tamil blog.

(For English-only readers: Sorry; shall post a consolidated write-up towards the end of the month, when I could make time for this.)

Sexual Harassment Charges Against a Retired Supreme Court Judge

It all started with a post -- Through My Looking Glass -- by Stella James who alleged that she was harassed by a "recently retired" Supreme Court judge back in December 2012 when she was interning with him. She elaborated a bit more in an interview to Legally India. While a a three member committee set up by the Supreme Court is inquiring into this case, several things have happened:

• Another intern leaves a Facebook comment supporting James' allegations.

• Mihira Sood writes an opinion piece at Legally India: In one of India’s ‘most sexist professions’, harassment by powerful men is rife.

• Nikhil Kanekal's story at Outlook leaves several clues that help reveal the alleged perpetrator -- see this post at Law and Other Things for further clues.

• Indira Jaising, Additional Solicitor General of India, pens an open letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court demanding greater transparency in the functioning of the inquiry committee. It's filled with scathing remarks about the legal profession, the attitude of the judges, and even the "architecture of the Supreme Court".

• An NGO called Lawyers Collective has asked the Supreme Court to follow its own policy -- called the Vishaka Guidelines -- in dealing with this case.

• In a MInt column, Farah Rahman draws the parallels between this case and the allegations of harassment made by Anita Hill against the Justice Clarence Thomas during his Senate confirmation hearings. Her column ends on a hopeful note:

  One result of Hill’s decision to come forward with the allegations was that it brought the issue of workplace sexual harassment to the fore and the hearings brought the issue live to anyone who had a television and could bear to watch the hearings. The year after the hearings, 1992, saw a record number of women run for office and win. There is no question that Hill’s decision to out the truth was brave, unprecedented and paved the way for women to speak up and take charge. This is also happening now in India.

Narendra Modi: "Vote for the Louts"

Freudian slip, or misspeak? In either case, this fabulous fail of a tweet is way too funny:

Urged people to start voting early, vote for the Louts & give BJP a chance to serve them once again.

More links

1. Dhimant Parekh: Of Rains, Cows and a Picture: "For that moment, we four [three men and a cow] were all in one world, in one picture."

2. G. Lakshmi: Handwriting:

   I hated articles that expounded the relationship between handwriting and character/future/talent/life. According to all these articles, I was a potential criminal, utter failure and possibly not worth living.

3. Anil Kumble's Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi Memorial Lecture: Perception and Practice:

   He first led the team at 21, when every other player was senior to him. He must have worked hard at appearing almost casual in his stroke play, as if to suggest that cricket was the easiest game in the world— in fact so easy that he could play the best bowlers with just one good eye. The effect on his team was phenomenal. The perception of ease communicated itself to the many who were inhibited, diffident and under-confident.

Links

1. Wildlife photographer, author of Secret Lives, and IISc alumna Natasha Mhatre writes about the hard work that went into the wonderful potter wasp pic that won the first prize in the National Wildlife Federation photo contest. Key quote: " I didn't click it, I didn't snap it, no, no, I stalked it and I made it."

2. Mathematical eye-candy: John Baez has an animated picture of the Enneper Surface drawn by Greg Egan.

3. Vi Hart: How I Feel About Logarithms: "I like the number 8. I like the way it smells like 2 and 4 with a hint of 3 in a cubic sort of way ..."

Faculty Power!

Two links. First, from The Telegraph: Carrot for IIT directors:

A former IIT director, however, said the new system [of assessing the performance and effectiveness of IIT directors] would encourage the directors to appease the faculty members.

“Since the selection panel will receive feedback from the faculty, the director will not take any tough decision (that might annoy the teachers). The administration will concentrate on appeasing the faculty,” he said.

Second, from Forbes: The Toughest Leadership Job Of All (It's Not What You Think:

The most powerful group within a university is its tenured faculty. If they refuse to listen to you, you can’t fire them. That’s the whole idea behind academic freedom. But it makes moving in a new direction fraught with peril.

As one college president told me, “You don’t say, ‘Professor Smith, I need you to make this change.’ Instead, you say, “Professor Smith, I have a great idea I’d like to run past you. I really need your input in order to make this work, and I wonder if you have any thoughts about how to improve my idea and how to implement it?”

Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying that? Brilliant as he was, he’d last eight nano-seconds as the president of Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, USC, UCLA, Caltech ...